Disclaimer: Buffy, Spike and the Original Scoobies aren’t mine. All their kids...you bet.

Author’s note: Thanks and hugs to BTL for the beta.
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Chapter 3: Potential

“It doesn’t work like that,” Willow tried to explain to an irate Buffy.

“Make it work like that, you did the spell down in the hellmouth, you can do anything,” Buffy protested.

Willow raised her hands in defence. “I can’t do it. Until she’s fifteen, I can’t tell if Bianca is a potential or not. You’ll have to wait, it’s only a few months. There is no spell to find potentials until they are fifteen.”

Buffy crossed her arms in a pout. It had seemed so easy. Ask Willow if Bianca was a potential. It would answer questions, maybe solve problems.

True to her agreement, Bianca had started talking to Nikki again, and the two friends and sisters were happy and talkative right up until Dawn, Xander, Jesse, Will, Richard, and Nikki left for England.

Willow, Oz, Dan, and TJ were all packed to go too, but in the opposite direction. They were off to Phoenix to visit Willow’s parents.

Soon the house would be back to normal. Giles and his family had left earlier, sadly not taking Andrew with them once again.

It was proving to be a summer of angst, and Bianca had still to find out that she was going to summer school. That was an announcement better left for when company were far, far away.

Which was what was going to happen imminently. In fact, suitcases were waiting for Willow to levitate them into the trunk of Buffy’s car, or so Dan and TJ were hoping, neither wanting to carry them.

The fact that their mother was a very powerful witch was not lost on them at all.

“I want you to stay!” Rowan complained to her nine year old cousin.

For his part, Dan looked askance at his cousin. Rowan was four and as a nine year old he had no patience for anyone that was younger than him. Also, he was trying to perfect cool. His father was the epitome of cool. He was just waiting for the day when his father would let him dye his hair.

“Buffy, you’ll have to wait until her fifteenth birthday,” Willow concluded. “There’s nothing I can do before then.”

With a sigh, Buffy gave up. She turned to face the stairs behind her, shouting for Bianca and Spike to come down and say goodbye to the departing witch, werewolf and their brood.

Bianca thumped down the stairs. Buffy had been pretty sure that she’d been listening to her mother’s pleading about the spell. It was all for her anyway. There was no reason why she shouldn’t hear about it. Decked out in the lasted fashion, Bianca waved a silent goodbye to her cousins, aunt and uncle.

“Spike!” Buffy bellowed when her vampire husband didn’t come downstairs.

“Da’s asleep,” Bianca noted to her aunt Willow. “’Cause that’s what vampire’s do in the middle of the day,” she concluded with a sigh.

“No, that’s what fathers do when four year olds don’t go to sleep because someone left a whole bag of fuzzy peaches out where a four year old could eat them!” Buffy countered, looking at the fourteen year old.

“It wasn’t me!” Bianca protested.

In a grumble the peroxided vampire descended the stairs, finding himself a place to sit on the second one up from the bottom.

“Have a good trip,” he muttered, bleary eyed. “Don’t freak out your grandparents too much,” he warned the kids.

“I wish!” TJ answered. “Grandma Rosenberg is always trying to analyse me. My unmarried parents make me a prime candidate for many studies.”

“I thought your mother had retired?” Buffy asked Willow.

“She’ll never retire,” muttered the witch, resigned. “She’s rather unpleasant to visit.”

“Last time they visited she told me I was going to hell cause I wasn’t circum…something…” Dan added to the four year old at his feet. “Whatever that is.”

“You don’t want to know,” Spike added, standing again. “Come on, little tree,” he called to his four year old daughter, “there are cartoons with your name on them, and your Da wants to sleep some more before your mum gets back from the airport.”

“And we have to get going,” Buffy added, picking up a suitcase. “Bianca, you could help.”

With a sigh, Bianca did as her mother suggested and followed the group out of the house. All her life she’d lived at the house on Pine street across from the cemetery. Everyone always wanted to come to her house for Halloween, ‘cause it was spooky and dangerous. Of course Halloween was an interesting day in their family.

Just how was she supposed to explain that there was a picture of her mom and a little girl in a Tinkerbell outfit on the mantel, a little girl that clearly wasn’t Bianca or Rowan or Nikki? Or how about the fact that her father laughed openly at the costumed children that came to the door? Or how her mom and dad always thought something bad was going to happen on Halloween.

Which was sad, ‘cause Halloween was Bianca’s birthday.

And Rowan’s birthday.

Bianca hoisted the suitcase she was carrying into the trunk of her mother’s car and stepped back as Willow and her family did the same. Hugged by Aunt Willow, she was nearly into the house before her mother’s voice called her back.

“I expect to see you at home when I come back from the airport, Bianca,” ordered Buffy. “Your father and I need to talk to you.”

A look of horror passed over Bianca’s face. This was not good.

Standing on the front step, Bianca watched the SUV leave the driveway, her mind wondering just what she had done to merit a ‘talk’.

In her fourteen year old brain, life was unfair, unjust, and it was completely mean of her parents to do this to her. Her mother had told her to stay. Her father was upstairs, presumably sleeping while Rowan watched TV.

Of course that didn’t mean she could take advantage of the situation. Her da would know if she left the house, he had those uncanny vampire senses. Damn him.

You would think that she would have some sort of fun powers. You know, if she wasn’t allowed to be normal at least she should be a full fledged freak.

With the impending sense of doom hanging over her, Bianca had no choice but to go back into the house in a pout. She had plans today too. Now that the extended family were all gone she could once again socialise with actual friends.

If you could call them that.

That’s when it suddenly hit her that Nikki was gone. She didn’t have a friend and sister at home anymore to entertain her. Bianca closed the door behind her, the quiet click of the latch louder than she thought it should be. Or maybe it was just her imagination.

Her feet took her upstairs towards her room. When extended family was not visiting, the second floor of the house was the only floor on which people slept. She stood at the top of the stairs contemplating just how her family had changed. To her right was Rowan’s tiny room. The nursery. It had been her room when she was born, and the next time her mom got pregnant it would be that baby’s room. Next to Rowan’s room was her parents’, the soft sounds of a Disney musical emanating from it. It a safe bet that both Rowan and her da were sleeping curled up together.

To her left, was the now empty room Nikki used to call home. Bianca walked to the doorway and pushed it open. Nikki had left a lot of her stuff behind, posters, stuffed animals, and her large shoe collection.

Nikki was her sister. Of course at some point she knew that they all weren’t going to live together forever, even if her parents were immortal. Someday they’d both go off to university. Bianca just figured that they would go together.

And then there was Richard.

She was less broken up about him leaving. She had known that he was going to go. It had been planned, discussed and debated around many family dinners. Richard wanted to be a watcher, like grandpa Giles, like his father had been (sorta). There was no way he was going to be a slayer, being a guy and all, and vampirism was just weird, (no offence to Da).

His room upstairs in the attic was all packed up. Richard didn’t expect to come back except for holidays for the rest of his life. Eventually he’d move all of his stuff out of the room and to England.

No more older brother looking out for her. No more older sister doing the same. Bianca was the older sister now. No longer the middle child.

It was like a huge mountain of responsibility just crashed down on her shoulders. Quick steps carried her to her own room on the far side of Nikki’s empty room. She slammed her door and threw herself onto her bed.

Two doors down, Spike blinked, his eyes being fixed upon the singing mermaid on the TV screen before him. In his arms, Rowan sat enraptured, the slammed door barely registering with her. He kissed the top of her brown head and manoeuvred himself out from behind her.

“Gotta talk to your sister,” he whispered.

Rowan nodded, her eyes never leaving the screen.

He had to say that he was lucky that only one of his offspring ever had a Dawn sized meltdown at a time. Upon reflection, he didn’t know what was more remarkable in that sentence. That he had offspring, or that he knew that they would subject him to Dawn sized meltdowns.

It came from procreating with a Summers girl.

To have yet more Summers girls.

But the eldest was crying her beating heart out. He might have a soul and be all reformed and such, but he still had all those nice vampire senses. Spike leaned up against the doorframe, turned the knob, and pushed the door open with his foot.

“Go away Da!” Bianca sobbed into her pillow.

“Not likely. I don’t appreciate doors being slammed in my house. It tends to make the super sensitive hearing cranky. You don’t want to see me cranky.”

Bianca sat up, her nose red and sniffly. She wasn’t close to laughing yet, but Spike could see the glimmer of not depressed and crying return.

“Your mother let it slip that we had to talk to you?” he said more than questioned.

Bianca nodded, the look of fear returning to her face.

“She never was one to keep her mouth shut. Right then. The talk. You are going to summer school. Starts on Monday. Here ends the talk.”

If she wasn’t so angry at him, Spike was convinced that Bianca would have been laughing. He was a damn funny vamp when he decided to be.

“What!” Bianca shouted as it all sunk in. “Why do I have to go to summer school?”

“You failed math.”

“I did NOT fail math. A fifty-five percent means that I passed math…by a whole five percent!” she added.

“Do I really need to argue against this point? Seems pretty clear to me. And I’ve been dead for a good long time.”

“What does being dead got to do with it?”

“Lost on the young,” Spike mumbled with a shake of his head. “Regardless, Bianca, you are going to summer school. And before you go and turn on the waterworks, I’ve already talked to the mother of that friend of yours, Diane is going too. You won’t be friendless in a sea of delinquents.”

“You think I’m a delinquent?” Bianca exclaimed. “Great, you think I’m dumb and I’m a delinquent.”

“No,” he said slowly for clarification. “I think you have more potential in grade nine math than a fifty-five percent and I am hoping that you will be a shining example of how young ladies should act. Though I can’t imagine why I would think that as the only examples you’ve had are your mother and Nikki.”

“I’m girlier than mum.”

“And that’s saying something.”

And then they said nothing for a while. Spike could still hear that blasted mermaid’s singing coming from his bedroom while Bianca refused to look him in the eye.

“You got anything else in that pretty blond head of yours that needs talking out?” Spike asked.

“Oh, how about my life is a mess. I’m going to be a superhero in training on my birthday, I have no real friends, except Nikki, but wait she’s gone. My parents are immortal superheroes who look like they couldn’t have possibly raised three teenagers and a kindergartener. I have to be the responsible one now, ‘cause Nikki and Richard are gone. And NOW I have to go to summer school.”

“Life is rough when you are fourteen,” Spike noted. “Not that it gets any easier as time goes by.”

“You’ve got the easiest life ever!” Bianca ranted.

“Hardly, button,” Spike answered, using the nickname that he’d had for Bianca when she was young. A nickname that Bianca had expressly asked him not to use when she turned eleven.

“How? How is it not easy for you? You sleep all day, you have live in baby sitters while you go off and butchered demons…”

“Bad demons,” Spike was quick to point out.

“And you get paid for something you would do anyways, ‘cause it’s mom’s calling, blah blah bitty blah. There’s always blood in the fridge, and if there isn’t, there’s mom, which is extremely gross now that I think about it. You’re never going to die, unless you trip and fall on something wooden, and you’ll wait out the rest of your unlife waiting for that stupid prophecy on the fridge door to come to pass. And you’ll probably just shrug your shoulders and go ‘huh’ when it does, and find something new to wonder about. You’re never going to die!”

“That’s a good thing right?” came Rowan’s voice from behind Spike. “I don’t want Da to die. Not again.”

Stooping for a moment, Spike lifted his youngest daughter up into his arms, a look of concern on his face. Rowan was four now, she was starting to pick up on things that were said in the house. Not that they’d ever tried to keep secrets from the children.

“How do you mean, little tree?” Spike probed, wanting to know just how much of his history Rowan had picked up.

“Mommy said that you’d died before. You were even stevens. Is your real name Steven?”

Spike and Bianca chuckled.

“Da’s real name is William. William Graves,” Bianca answered.

“And I’m Rowan Graves,” Rowan beamed proudly. “Rowan Tara Graves.”

“That you are little tree,” Spike responded. He turned his attention back to Bianca. “We done here?” he asked. “I want this out and ranted before your mother gets home. Two crazed and ranting Summers women I don’t think I can handle at once.”

“I’m a Graves woman!” noted Rowan proudly.

“Give me a few years before we decide, alright little tree,” he asked, setting her down. “I’m starting to think that maybe you’ve got some Rosenburg in you.”
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Tbc…